Sensualistic, Polytheistic

Miraculously, after 32 years, the New York Dolls do
it again

"So everybody gets makeup, OK? You look dead on TV without it."
Back in the Conan greenroom from a Camel-stoked walk to the
Hilton with his girlfriend Leah, David Johansen was taking charge of
the reconstituted New York Dolls, who didn't really need the help. The
sextet showed a lot of denim in rehearsal, but all manner of magpie
finery came out at the witching hour, with red-on-black a
theme--Jersey guitarist Steve Conte's red-lined frock coat, keyb pro
Brian Koonin's red derby, the red rose in nice-guy bassist Sami
Yaffa's hair. The multiple accessories to Syl Sylvain's colorful
costume include a snarly-wolf wristband and Max's Kansas City kidney
belt painted by his wife Wanda in Atlanta, whom he called before he
went on. And Johansen--whew. Jean Harlow (?) T-shirt. Stovepipe
flares. Belts and rhinestones and silvery chains. They were a great
band dressed to kill again.

Many reunions never get past the tour that's never as hot as true
believers claim. And the creditable albums some bands manage never
live up to old glories. The Dolls' new album doesn't either, but
that's compared to my desert island discs--with this band, I'm the
true believer. Their second shot took nearly 30 years, a decade-plus
more than Blondie or Mission of Burma or Gang of Four. With junko
partners Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan gone since 1991 and 1992,
three of the original Dolls survived till Morrissey engineered a
London one-shot two years ago. His dream fulfilled, bassist Arthur
Kane died of previously undiagnosed leukemia a month later, leaving
David and Syl to ride the one-shot's reverberations. But though the
pace has slowed and the execution filled out, though Thunders's
squalling sound and drop-dead time are irreplaceable, they're still
the New York Dolls.

The Dolls came together at one of Queens' less distinguished
educational institutions--Sylvain, Thunders, and classic drummer Billy
Murcia, who died in a 1972 drug bollocks, all attended Newtown High
School, and Kane grew up nearby. Staten Islander David Johansen they
met downtown, and he was different. Bluntly put, what Sylvain calls
the Dolls' "skyscraper soup" wouldn't have been all that tasty without
Johansen's genius as songwriter and frontman. The forced rhythms and
slapdash musicianship of this fast, noisy mix-up--comprising, Sylvain
reckoned, girl group, blues, Eddie Cochran, Young Rascals, and Little
Rascals--read radically anti-hippie and now just seems
quintessentially rock and roll. But it presaged punk, and it
influenced thousands of bands--none of whom sounded remotely like the
Dolls because none of them had Johansen's eye for a joke, nose for a
hook, clothes sense, appetite, or humanity. Nobody does.

Since the Dolls fell apart without having approached the megasales
dancing in their heads, Johansen has enjoyed a solo career that
included a long stint as cruise-ship popmeister Buster Poin-dexter and
a briefer one yodeling in the canon with the ad hoc Harry Smiths. But
give the new album half a chance and it stands as a miraculous
demonstration of how much this modestly cultured middle- class New
Yorker--dad an opera-singing insurance salesman, mom a
librarian--benefits from the proximity of dead-end kids. He's written
hundreds of songs with collaborator Koonin. But when sound-check riffs
evolved into songs and then a deal with the metal heavyweights at
Roadrunner Records for the first Dolls album in 32 years, Johansen
knew he had to generate fresh material. "It's like being the
speechwriter for a party," he told me, coyly leaving out the
"political." Fools will grouse about a 56-year-old pretending he's 22
again, just as Mojo's Kris Needs recently groused that New
York Dolls and In Too Much Too Soon were "neutered,"
"limp" renderings of the band's pansexuality. The Dolls always were
over some people's heads.

I've held off on the album's strange title because it says so much:
One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. The "even" is
preemptive; those who level the self-evident charge that the Dolls
don't jam like they used to should check their own jam level and say
something new. But what's more mind-boggling is that after 30 years
Johansen isn't looking back from his earned maturity--he's looking
ahead. He has internalized his mortality so thoroughly that he
realizes he won't be 56 forever. This is a true Dolls album--as in the
Conan-featured "Dance Like a Monkey," which bids a "pretty
little creationist" to shake her "monkey hips" now that "evolution is
obsolete," or the opening "We're All in Love," with its "Jumping
around like teenage girls" and its "We all sleep in one big bed." But
it also expresses the worldview of a lean, strong-piped guy who
understands what makeup is for and knows that he may not be pretty in
pink forever.

Johansen scoffed at my suggestion that his new album harbored
religious feelings, and I didn't push it. Instead I'll just mention
the booklet's Kali Yoga shout-out and quote a few lyrics. "Feel exiled
from the divine," for instance. Or "Nature with its true voice cries
out undissembled, 'Be as I am!'" in the one that ends "Sensualistic/
Ritualistic/Alchemistic/Polytheistic." Or the loose talk about
infinity in the two songs that lead into the perorating "Take a Good
Look at My Good Looks," which begins, "Spirit slumbers in nature/And
awakens in mind/And finally recognizes/Itself in time." The ghost
track "Seventeen" is tacked on as a corrective. Begins: "I was down on
the corner one night." Continues: "I was made all of light."

Fools may wonder why Johansen needs dead-end kids to write like
this. Where's the party? But the Dolls were dead-end kids in
transcendence mode. Their goal was and is the unbounded, humorous
humanism apparent in Bob Gruen and Nadia Beck's circa-1973 All
Dolled Up DVD, a far more vivid memento than any concert
bootleg. Their summum was Too Much Too Soon's future Guns N'
Roses text "Human Being"; their big drug slogan was "I need a kiss not
a fix." They were anti-hippie only insofar as hippies were passive
(the Dolls rocked nonstop) and pretentious (David and Syl rail at
20-minute guitar solos as if they just tuned one out on
WPLJ). Heterosexuals all, they believed in universal love the way
disco utopian David Mancuso believed in universal love--with a sloppy
touch of the Cockettes. "I've been trying to convince Syl that what we
had in the '70s wasn't sex," Johansen explained at Randalls Island in
2004, and again at Irving Plaza in 2005. A Monica Lewinsky joke, he
couldn't resist. But think of it this way--maybe what they had in the
'70s was love.

One attraction of Johansen's newfound Buddhist rhetoric is that it
doesn't shy away from the carnal. The knowledgeable lust of "Fishnets
& Cigarettes" and the pussy-worshipping "Running Around" counter the
lived despair of "Punishing World," "Maimed Happiness," and the hope-
deprived "I Ain't Got Nothin'." And that draft for a suicide note
leads into a redemptive earthly-love triptych that dovetails
plausibly, if not definitively, with what is known of Johansen's
personal life, in which a long marriage to photographer Kate Simon was
followed by his relationship with Leah Hennessey, whose teenage
daughter designed the 10-page comic that comprises the notes. He
remains a votary of l-u-v.

That is, he remains a New York Doll. "This is the most fun way I
can think of right now to not work," Johansen told me, but he has big
plans for his lark. No "bar band" or "preaching to the choir" for this
mature professional entertainer who began his career believing he was
about to take over the world. "This is going to be a big record. It's
like there's no rock and roll records out there. It's a fait
accompli."

It isn't, but don't tell the folks at Roadrunner. Tell them they've
underwritten another desert island disc. Because it's quite possible
they have.